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Thread: Why Lightroom if I have PS?

  1. #11

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    Re: Why Lightroom if I have PS?

    Thanks for the replies all. I decided to purchase LR. As I am now a contributor to a stock agency and will be shooting some reasonably high res digital (nikon800E) on my trips it looks like I'll need something that is more organized. When all i was producing was 10 images a year PS was more than sufficient. Now there will be vastly more images.

    With scanned images though, do you first run them through LR for basic corrections like sharpness and levels, and save PS for layers and clean up?

  2. #12

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    Re: Why Lightroom if I have PS?

    Quote Originally Posted by Brian K View Post
    With scanned images though, do you first run them through LR for basic corrections like sharpness and levels, and save PS for layers and clean up?
    Pretty much. Even spotting/de-scratching images can be done pretty well in LR. The Spot Removal tool is quite accurate so you can probably do most of it there and any final cleaning in Photoshop.

  3. #13

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    Re: Why Lightroom if I have PS?

    Gee I open my scans up in Bridge/ACR and do editing there before Photoshop... it is less destructive I think, seems to work well.

    I've had LR 4.1 sitting on my drive for a while now and haven't gotten into it because it has an entirely different look and feel than Photoshop and even the other CS apps... it's like its own little world unto itself. Why it couldn't be integrated to be as consistent as InDesign-Illustrator- and Photoshop are is a puzzle, especially considering that Adobe charge a premium price and has a huge user base. You'd think that after cramming CS "integration" down our throats that they'd at least drink their own KoolAid and make LR look like PS.

    End of rant - we all know Adobe has us by the short hairs and they are not a customer-focused company. They want to charge the most they can for the smallest amount of work that goes into an upgrade, so they churn out some bells and whistles while leaving the boring UI and performance issues to whenever they get around to it or they become so awful they break.

    Before I truly start using LR I want to first determine a really good-for-my-lifetime file naming strategy and what I want in my file's metadata. And then I want to reorganize my hard drives and existing file organization so if LR indexes everything then I'm able to do it once and not be changing things around and screwing up LR six months from now. Then I think it will be great to get everything into it, all of my existing and future work. The one advantage of it being Adobe is the huge user base will prevent it from becoming completely obsolete as quickly as the small Mom-and-Pop apps.

  4. #14

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    Re: Why Lightroom if I have PS?

    I've tried LR four times, abandoned it in short order four times too.
    You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. ~ Mark Twain

  5. #15
    bob carnie's Avatar
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    Re: Why Lightroom if I have PS?

    Brian - I still use PS for those purposes. Sharpening is always in PS
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian K View Post
    Thanks for the replies all. I decided to purchase LR. As I am now a contributor to a stock agency and will be shooting some reasonably high res digital (nikon800E) on my trips it looks like I'll need something that is more organized. When all i was producing was 10 images a year PS was more than sufficient. Now there will be vastly more images.

    With scanned images though, do you first run them through LR for basic corrections like sharpness and levels, and save PS for layers and clean up?

  6. #16
    Kirk Gittings's Avatar
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    Re: Why Lightroom if I have PS?

    (If you are not going to invest in PS or other editors then LR is a good way to get a 16 bit editor and some useful sharpening tools similar to PK sharpener, I am also probably ignorant and badly informed.)
    In terms of Lightroom?......totally.....
    Thanks,
    Kirk

    at age 73:
    "The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep"

  7. #17
    Kirk Gittings's Avatar
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    Re: Why Lightroom if I have PS?

    Brian, I use both for nearly all my my work, b&w scanned images and digital capture. I vastly prefer the filing system and basic image editing tools in LR but end up taking about half my digital capture files into PS and all my scanned images into PS for further work.
    Thanks,
    Kirk

    at age 73:
    "The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep"

  8. #18

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    Re: Why Lightroom if I have PS?

    Not totally. The output sharpening in LR is straight from PK sharpener and the PK sharpener guys had major input into its sharpening tools, though I dont see any creative sharpening tools, the workflow of multiple pass and purpose dependant sharpening is from PK sharpening.
    Lets say you scan a negative using epson scan or vuescan, to edit it in LR it must be imported, nothing LR does is applied to the file, it just keeps a record of what you did (so it uses less room than PS) but lets say you prefer to do something in another editor. To get your file to the other editor it must be exported, so the other editor can see your adjustments. Say you are used to opening files directly in whatever editor you like, does not work with LR. To use LR you must accept that it is the bedrock of your workflow, you cant live without it. It takes over your drive and you must live within its walls and use only the front door. Clearly its not a bad place to be judging by the number of people who like it, I have tried it again but I still dont love it. Shurely it is a 16 bit editor, it understands my 16 and 48 bit tiffs. Perhaps you are a worn out professor, but try putting your cap back on and backing up your argument with facts.

  9. #19
    Kirk Gittings's Avatar
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    Re: Why Lightroom if I have PS?

    Well not really. It is far more flexible than that. For example you don't have to officially export a file into PS you can just open it with LR edits applied-like flattening adjustment layers in PS. Its not all that complicated. Also I sometimes work from Bridge, opening a scanned file directly into PS then save it to a LR folder. It can live there (invisible to LR) or I can always find it there with Bridge or Finder or I can simply Synchronize that folder in LR and it will be imported and visible in LR-very simple and elegant.

    What do you mean it "takes over your hard drive"? Nothing it does IME fits that description at all. I have many external hard drives that have both LR catalogued files and ones that are not.
    Thanks,
    Kirk

    at age 73:
    "The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep"

  10. #20

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    Re: Why Lightroom if I have PS?

    Quote Originally Posted by mdm View Post
    Not totally. The output sharpening in LR is straight from PK sharpener and the PK sharpener guys had major input into its sharpening tools, though I dont see any creative sharpening tools, the workflow of multiple pass and purpose dependant sharpening is from PK sharpening.
    Lets say you scan a negative using epson scan or vuescan, to edit it in LR it must be imported, nothing LR does is applied to the file, it just keeps a record of what you did (so it uses less room than PS) but lets say you prefer to do something in another editor. To get your file to the other editor it must be exported, so the other editor can see your adjustments. Say you are used to opening files directly in whatever editor you like, does not work with LR. To use LR you must accept that it is the bedrock of your workflow, you cant live without it. It takes over your drive and you must live within its walls and use only the front door. Clearly its not a bad place to be judging by the number of people who like it, I have tried it again but I still dont love it. Shurely it is a 16 bit editor, it understands my 16 and 48 bit tiffs. Perhaps you are a worn out professor, but try putting your cap back on and backing up your argument with facts.
    It's not too difficult to create a virtual copy of the image you're working on and exporting that to work on externally as opposed to the original file, which wouldn't be touched. You create your virtual copy and export it as a TIF or PSD with the Lightroom processing applied to it so it'll export your image with any changes you've made in Lightroom, and then you edit that in Photoshop or MS Paint.

    You then have your original image, a virtual copy of your original image which has non-destructive amends to it that can be reversed or additional work added to it and then you've exported a TIF/PSD file with your amends applied that can be edited in whatever your external tool of choice is. It's pretty flexible really and not that much of an effort to export your image.

    Plus, I find working with Lightroom to manage (and find) my images far, far more efficient than using Finder (on my Mac) to dig through all my images. Horses for courses and all that though.

    Sure, in some ways if you start using Lightroom, you're kind of tied into a Lightroom workflow but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

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